Kabbalah (15 page)

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by their place of origin, little eastern European towns such as Bratslav, Liadi, and Belz), and leadership was transferred from father to son. The transition from charismatic to dynastic leadership was expressed by the paradoxical doctrine that stated “there is no
zaddik
but the son of a
zaddik
”; “
zaddik”
in Hebrew is a common, simple term, meaning righteous or charitable. It is absurd to suppose that there is no righteous person but the son of one; this is a clear indication that the term “
zaddik”
acquired a new, radically different meaning in the context of Hasidic leadership.

The main mystical doctrine of Hasidism became the theory of the
zaddik
, which basically asserts that it is only possible to approach God through the mediation of the
zaddik,
who is regarded as a divine messenger. The
zaddik
(popularly called rebbe) is responsible for redeeming the souls of his adherents, bringing their prayers before the throne of God, and ensuring that if they sin their repentance will be accepted. He is also responsible for his believers’ health, fertility, and livelihood. In return, the Hasidim (adherents) owe him faith, which he uses as a source of spiritual power to achieve these goals, and they provide the worldly needs of the
zaddik
and his family. When he dies, his son (or, sometimes, son-in-law) becomes
zaddik
.

Each dynastic house of
zaddikim,
of which there are scores, has a group of followers. These dynastic groups have been established now for seven or eight generations, overcoming the dis-persions and persecutions of eastern European Jewry. After the devastation of the Holocaust, they reestablished their centers on new continents, especially in and around New York City in the United States and Jerusalem and Bney-Brak in Israel. These dynasties survive and flourish because of the deep belief in the mystical bond holding together the dynasty of the
zaddik
and the families of his followers. The conception of the
zaddik
as an intermediary between the worshipper and God has become, since the early nineteenth century, the main subject that separates the Hasidim from the Opponents and, actually, every other 97

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Jewish denomination. To non-Hasidim, this doctrine seems to be heretical, because it endows a human being with divine attributes, and denies direct connection between an individual and God.

It is rather clear that the theory of the
zaddik
is a microreflection of the messianic theory of Nathan of Gaza, the prophet of the Sabbatian movement. The universal redeemer of Sabbatianism was substituted in Hasidism by a minor redeemer, whose authority is constricted by geography, chronol-ogy, and a distinct group of adherents, but the basic structure remains intact. The
zaddik
—who is responsible for the spiritual and material welfare of his community, which puts its faith in him—can be described as a minor messianic figure, bringing to his adherents a kind of minimal redemption. Typologically, it is somewhat similar to the structure of the Catholic Church, which promises the faithful a spiritual and physical well-being through its power as an intermediary between the faithful and God. Both of them marginalize universal, cosmic redemption, because of the constant presence of the divine emissary within this world. In this sense, Hasidism “neutralized” the messianic drive in Jewish religious actvity (a term Gershom Scholem introduced to characterize Hasidism), and in its place established the
zaddik
as an everyday redeemer and savior. The dynastic structure provides confidence that this state of affairs will continue in the future. Because of this conservative impulse, Hasidism was the main opponent to all Jewish movements in the nineteenth and twentieth century that were motivated by a quest for a better life, both material and spiritual. The Hasidim fiercely opposed not only any attempt at religious reform, but also the emigration of Jews to new countries, including America, South Africa, and the western European nations. They also opposed Jewish socialist movements, and especially they were the most ardent opponents of Zionism. Many Hasidic groups do not recognize the State of Israel, and regard it as a foreign government established by Jewish heretics. Despite these be-98

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liefs, the Holocaust, which made Jewish life in traditional Hasidic areas impossible, forced some Hasidim to relocate to the United States and Israel.

The Sabbatian roots of the
zaddik
doctrine become apparent when a
zaddik
steps out of line and claims to be the redeemer not only of his own dynastic community but of the people of Israel as a whole. The Hasidic dynasties coexist because of their understanding that each of them is responsible first and foremost to the families of their traditional adherents, much like dynastic monarchies. However, from time to time there emerges a
zaddik
who claims to be “the true
zaddik
,” a messiah for everybody, for all times. Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav, the grand-son of the Besht, made such a claim in 1805–1811, and he continues to have adherents to this day—more than 190 years after his death—who await his return as the ultimate messianic redeemer.

Marginalized by other Hasidic communities as a small, in-significant sect, the Bratslav believers were few, unorganized, and poor. Yet, because they denied the dynastic structure, they were open to everybody, and preached their ideas and distributed their books to all. Therefore, outsiders who were interested in Hasidism often met them first. For example, Martin Buber first approached Hasidism when he translated Rabbi Nahman’s narratives into German. Because there is no leadership structure in the Bratslav sect, it serves today as a meeting place for “repentants,” secular Jews who seek to rejoin tradition but who are unwilling to accept the strict orthodoxy of the established Hasidic dynasties. The Bratslav sect created a kind of bohemian, anarchistic spiritual group, which, in the last few years, sometimes prefers to describe itself as kabbalistic rather than Hasidic, conforming to the atmosphere and attitudes of contemporary spiritualists.

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This phenomenon was repeated on a much larger scale in Brooklyn in the 1980s and 1990s under the leadership of Rabbi Menachem Mendel Shneersohn, the seventh and last leader of Habad (Lubavitch) Hasidism, a rich and highly organized Hasidic sect. Tens of thousands of Jews in the United States, Europe, and Israel believed in Shneersohn’s messianic mission, and saw the first Gulf War as an indication of the apocalyptic, messianic era’s arrival. Shneersohn died in 1994, at the age of ninety-two, yet many of his Hasidim still believe in his destiny and await his return.

Rabbi Shenur Zalman of Liadi founded Habad Hasidism in the last decades of the eighteenth century, and it quickly became one of the most popular and well-organized Hasidic dynasties. The original teachings of the founder and his disciples tended to be intensely mystical, calling the visible universe a delusion, and preaching the submersion of individual characteristics and desires in quest of a complete fusion with the divine “nothingness,” the supreme Godhead. Despite this mysticism, Habad Hasidism acquired an image of being the more intellectual and learned sect among the Hasidic dynasties. The center of the sect was moved from place to place during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and it was one of the earliest to be established in New York City just before the Second World War and the Holocaust.

Menachem Mendel Shneersohn, the son-in-law of the previous leader, assumed office in 1950, and began a vast project of building an international organization of Habad communities that quickly spread and encompassed every country and city in which Jews lived. An elaborate system of Habad schools became one of the strongest educational systems in orthodox Judaism, and the fame and authority of Habad spread more widely than any Hasidic sect. At the heart of this endeavor was a Habad legend, which said that there will be seven Habad leaders in succession, and the seventh will be childless and he will be the messiah who will redeem the whole world. Needless to say, Shneersohn was the seventh, and he died without an heir.

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As he was growing old, the messianic enthusiasm among his adherents increased, and peaked in the late 1980s and the early 1990s. After his death some of the Habad faithful tried to diminish the messianic aspect, but many still worship him, pray at his grave, and await his return and the completion of the messianic process. Meanwhile, like the Bratslav Hasidim, they are leaderless, “dead Hasidim” as their opponents call them. It is impossible to predict now how the vast structure of Habad will develop in the future, but it is clear that Shneersohn was the leader of a great Jewish messianic movement in the twentieth century. Shneersohn did not emphasize the kabbalistic aspect of the messianic doctrine that he headed, yet his followers wrote detailed kabbalistic commentaries on his writings and sermons.

Neo-Hasidim

Since the last decades of the nineteenth century, a literary and spiritual phenomenon—which was expressed by the emergence of collections of Hasidic narratives, tales, and epigrams in Hebrew and Yiddish—joined the margins of the Hasidic movement. Some of the material in these anthologies was authentic, including the hagiography that surrounded the figures of the Hasidic leaders, but most of it was not; it also included traditional Jewish folktales and selections from traditional works.

These books gained popularity and were widely circulated, though they were read mainly by people outside of the Hasidic communities themselves. The phenomenon was, to a very large extent, an expression of nostalgia for traditional Jewish life that was felt by Jews who left the orthodox, Hasidic communities and were struggling to integrate in modern European societ-ies. Gradually, a distinct “non-Hasidic Hasidism” emerged, and this became a meaningful Jewish cultural phenomenon especially after the Holocaust, expressing the wish to cherish the old Jewish world that was so brutally destroyed. Collections of Hasidic tales were translated into many languages, and Jews 101

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and non-Jews shared an admiration for a past that was characterized by universal values of spirituality and social justice, which was now lost.

The impact of this neo-Hasidic literature, as it was sometimes called, peaked in the 1960s and 1970s, in the United States and Israel. Preachers and secular speakers quoted “Hasidic”

tales and anecdotes at every possible opportunity. The term “Hasidic” became a substitute for “Jewish,” reflecting the idea that Hasidism was somehow more spiritual and noble than just Judaism. This fashionable trend seems to have subsided in the 1980s, when authentic Hasidism gained strength and became a meaningful political and social presence in Judaism, and not just a distant memory of an extinct past. Yet it seems that the need for a more spiritual and noble synonym for “Judaism”

was still present, and from the 1990s to the present “Hasidim”

was replaced by the term “kabbalah.” When adherents of Habad or Bratslav Hasidism establish new circles and preach their doctrines today, they often prefer to use the term “kabbalah”

rather than “Hasidism,” both in Israel and in the United States.

Traditional kabbalah exists today mainly within the Hasidic communities. Hasidism, however, brought about a return of the kabbalah to its original esoteric place in Jewish culture, after it was popularized by Lurianism. The concept of the religious intermediary between man and God, the Hasidic leader, the
zaddik,
relegated creative study of the kabbalah to the leaders rather than to the followers. Hasidic popular literature, which consists mainly of collections of sermons, uses kabbalistic terminology, but the serious and creative study of the kabbalah is the domain of the
zaddik
and his circle of scholars.

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9

Some Aspects of

Contemporary Kabbalah

The Jewish enlightenment movement of the eighteenth century changed the status of the kabbalah and the meanings of the term dramatically both within Judaism and in European culture. This movement, which in the nineteenth century also became associated with religious reform, rejected the kabbalah as an expression of the ignorance and superstition of the Middle Ages, and strove to present Jewish worldviews based mainly on rationalism and adherence to social ethics. Jewish scholars and historians, especially those associated with the German “science of Judaism,” including Heinrich Graetz
,
described the kabbalah in the most derogatory terms. The kabbalah in Judaism was associated with orthodox Judaism, and was studied mainly among the Hasidim and the Opponents, and among Jewish scholars in the Middle East and North Africa. Modern Jewish institutions of higher learning did not find a place for the kabbalah in their curricula. There were a few exceptions. The great Hebrew poet, Hayyim Nachman Bialik, included the kabbalah in his project of assembling, editing, and publishing the treasures of Jewish tradition in a nonorthodox, modern Hebrew context. And, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, founded in 1926, invited Gershom Scholem to study and teach kabbalah at its Institute of Jewish Studies.

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